I just initiated a TM backup, and it completed in less than 10 seconds. No more mysterious messages on the Console Log either.

To answer a left-over question, the drive has a USB-2 connector. I don't expect Thunderbolt- or even USB-3 speed out of it, just decent performance. That seems to happening now. :-)))

Do you realize that you didn't really answer either of the questions?

That TM backup would have been an incremental backup, which I believe happens hourly. If you only changed one meg of data during that time, nearly any data transfer method common in the past 10 years would do that in under 10 seconds.

But it's probably fine.

If in the future you need to double check that something is running at the correct speed (entirely different than just if it supports that speed), you can try copying a file to it and timing it, or pull up System Profiler and take a look at the USB section. Within it, it shows the speed supported of each device.

For instance, when I have one of my jump drives in a rear port on my iMac, it says it supports 480 Mb/sec, whereas with it plugged into my keyboard it says it supports 12 Mb/sec. That's a huge difference of 40X!!!

If running at the full theoretical rate (not likely with USB), that's the difference of transferring 20 gigs taking 3.8 hours, vs less than 6 minutes!

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